I'm sure this question reveals that I need a true 3D package... Let's say I have drawn a plate, like a dinner plate. It has decorations all around it, and by drawing it with a purely frontal view (i.e., looking directly down on the plate), I was able to rotate copies of segment of the decoration x degrees around the center of the plate in order to create its full decoration. It also has depth an texture, easy enough to simulate in this frontal view and to duplicate around the perfect circle of the plate.

But now I need to show an edge view of this plate. With a cutaway. So, if you were to turn the plate in your hands and pretend it was cut in half (with the cut facing up), you would still see the lower half of the inner decoration, only now it is distorted because of the new view. Plus, the elevation of the outer edge is now apparent (not just indicated by shadows), so that decoration would be distorted by the elevation and curvature of the edge it is painted on.

It was already quite complicated to draw this frontally; I don't want to start from scratch just because I am viewing it from the side... I want to rotate this object in the Z dimension and have it look natural.

Are there any CS4 plugins that can take my vectors and map them to a wireframe, essentially, and let me rotate this as a 3D object? I want something more sophisticated than tools that map a flat design to a flat package, for example.

Would Adobe Illustrator 3D Effect be sufficient? this took about 30 seconds to create. You turn your art into a symbol and map it you might have to make a few symbols but you can achieve it I would think.

Here s how you map the art you create two symbols one for the center plane and the other for the rim if there is a rim.